Critical Praise

“Sly, searching.... Sarvas is astute in portraying how relationships can calcify in childhood, and the exquisite pain of attempting to repair them in adulthood.... [He] tackles big questions --- about what constitutes restitution, the nature of faith, the essential role of storytelling in our lives. A twist at the end, the book’s ultimate con, is too good to spoil, and left me rethinking the characters and the story. It’s a testament to Sarvas’s skill that such a trick felt like a gift.”

—Ellen Umansky, The New York Times Book Review

“While Sarvas’s book is full of cunningly prepared surprises, it is also a fundamentally thoughtful and meditative story, whose real plot is Matt’s achievement of a kind of perspective on his past.... While MEMENTO PARK is very much a book about the Hungarian Jewish experience, the dynamics it portrays are common to any immigrant family, where history is the thing everyone is trying to forget, even though it is present in every word.”

—Adam Kirsch, The Washington Post

“A psychologically rich portrait of familial discord.”

—Michael Magras, Newsday

“Mark Sarvas’s second novel leaps well beyond his first one into a spectacular realm of imagination and daring. MEMENTO PARK has everything in precisely the right proportions: pace, plot, suspense, intricate characters and meditations on the loneliness of a secular Jewish life that are heartfelt.... In short, Sarvas has somehow managed to nail down in this novel what it means to truly come to terms with a difficult past.”

—Elaine Margolin, The Jerusalem Post